Sensor networks have become ubiquitous in all types of machinery and infrastructure. These sensor networks are/will be extensively used in the Smart City, which includes public as well as private sensor networks the latter being a much-neglected source of information feed for a smart city administration (Komninos, 2014). This can include vehicle (from eScooter to mini-van) sharing data, park house data, etc. However, the city’s backbone IT infrastructure must be able to accept and process this data and to draw the right conclusions from them. The backbone of this IT infrastructure will for all practical purposes be an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System as it is already standard in the private sector (for an example, Müller-Török et al., 2019). This contribution analyzes the integration of sensor networks into ERP systems in the Smart City. It will also analyze the implications of this development for public sector education.

COVID-19 accelerated the drive towards distance learning, typically supported by web-based eLearning resources. There are also studies reviewing the transition to such as teaching style, whether in conjunction with traditional classroom teaching or as a supplement. This paper will focus on ERP-based teaching within a larger program to establish tertiary distance education in eGovernment in Germany (“eGov Campus”). It attempts to structure the topic and to advance some hypotheses that will be empirically tested against real-world data and experience from introducing this style of teaching in the eGov Campus.

e-Government in Germany is usually not ranked top of the class in Europe. Rankings, such as the EU eGovernment Benchmark 2022, UN E-Government Development Index and others show that Germany is rather poorly ranked among the developed nations of the world. The authors assume that there is a correlation between the quality of Public Sector Education regarding digital competences and the quality of e-Government the so digitally educated civil servants can deliver. Civil servants in Germany usually graduate from one of the approximately 20 main universities of public administration; hence, an overview of the digital competences taught there is the core of this article. The main result is that both the quantity and the quality of digital competences taught need to be improved and, in the worst case depend on the university chosen, even zero digital competences are taught to the future civil servants.

In 2021/2022 a consortium of European universities delivered a scientific basis for a policy fighting fake news and hate speech with support of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe, describing also the technical and legal basics of both phenomena. In this context a survey was performed with the delegates of the Congress and the book, which contained also the survey results, was presented to the Congress in its Spring Session 2022. In 2023 a broader survey was done in a selection of countries, which also returned 675 filled-in questionnaires from Romania. The part of the questionnaire dealing with possible remedies contained questions which remedies are considered technically and legally feasible by the participants.Confirming the results of the survey in 2021/2022 the results for Romania showed a severe lack of basic knowledge about how the internet works and its governance. In this paper we want to show the results for Romania in detail, discuss them and suggest possible training measures which seem necessary to make the local and regional politics and administration fit for the Digitalization.The analysis of data from other European countries showed that this phenomenon is not restricted to Romania but is widely recognizable all over Europe. It also confirms the results from the survey among the Congress delegates. Therefore, this paper may be based on the Romanian dataset, however it signifies a pan-European issue.The authors are grateful to Vice Dean Nicolae Urs (Babeș-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca) and Catalin Vrabie (National University of Political Studies and Public Administration) for their support in spreading the survey among Romanian municipalities.